Read Chapter 5: The Money Pit

The boiler made a sound like a dying animal at 2:47 a.m.

Jazz heard it from the mattress she’d wedged into the smaller bedroom—which she’d insisted on, claiming she needed “less square footage to keep tidy,” when really she just wanted the door between her and Tom’s snoring. The groan rattled through the pipes like something tectonic, followed by a wet, choking gurgle.

She lay still, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like Australia. *It’s fine,* she told herself. *Old buildings make noises. It’s just the wind. It’s just—*

The boiler coughed again. Then the radiator under the window ticked once, twice, and went silent.

The cold crept in fast. It was November in London, and this flat had the thermal efficiency of a paper bag. Jazz pulled the duvet up to her chin, but the chill was already seeping through the single-glazed windows. She checked her phone. The temperature readout on her weather app had dropped to four degrees. Inside.

She heard Tom’s footsteps in the hallway before his knock.

“You awake?”

“No.”

He opened the door anyway. He was wearing a faded grey hoodie over mismatched pajama bottoms, his hair sticking up at an angle that would have been funny if she weren’t freezing. “The boiler’s dead.”

“It’s not dead. It’s just—resting.”

“It’s making the sound of a goat being fed through a woodchipper, and then it stopped. That’s not resting. That’s dying.”

Jazz sat up, hugging the duvet around her shoulders. “You’re not a plumber.”

“No, but I’m a man who grew up in a house where the boiler died every winter. This is its death rattle. I’m telling you.” He crossed his arms, shivering. “We need to call someone.”

“At three in the morning?”

“At eight, when the emergency line opens. We can’t go twenty-six days without heat, Jazz. We’ll die.”

“We won’t die. We’ll just be very cold and very productive.”

But she knew he was right. The kind of cold that crept into your bones wasn’t just uncomfortable—it was the kind that made your fingers too stiff to type, that made you want to curl up under a blanket instead of making sales calls. It was a productivity killer. And productivity was all they had left.

---

The emergency plumber arrived at 9:15 a.m., a wiry man named Dave who smelled of cigarettes and looked at the boiler like he was assessing a corpse. He spent twenty minutes in the tiny utility cupboard, muttering to himself, before emerging with the expression of a man about to deliver a terminal diagnosis.

“It’s the heat exchanger,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “Corroded through. You need a new one.”

Jazz felt her stomach drop. “How much?”

Dave named a figure that made her ears ring. “Plus labor. And you’ll want the system flushed while I’m in there—there’s sludge in the pipes that’ll kill the new one in six months if you don’t.”

Tom ran a hand through his hair. “Is there a cheaper option?”

“Thermal blankets. Electric heaters. Space blankets and prayer, if you’re feeling spiritual.” Dave shrugged. “But if you want hot water and heat, that’s the price.”

Dave left them with a quote and a business card, promising to “hold the slot” until noon in case they decided. The door clicked shut, and the silence that followed was heavier than the cold.

“We don’t have that,” Jazz said quietly.

Tom was already pulling out his phone. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Tom, that’s more than our combined monthly stipend. We have no revenue. Our runway is—“

“I said I’ll figure it out.”

There was something tight in his voice, something she recognized from the night he lost the cufflink. Panic, thinly veiled. She wanted to push, but she’d seen what happened when she pushed him. She stopped.

“Look,” she said instead, softer. “I have maybe three hundred I can contribute. It’s not enough, but it’s something.”

Tom looked up from his phone. “Three hundred? Jazz, you told Marcus we had a six-month runway.”

“We have a six-month *operational* runway. That assumes no catastrophic failures. It assumes I don’t have a landlord who just raised my rent to a number that requires a second mortgage.” She swallowed. “I don’t have savings, Tom. I have a budget. And this—” she gestured at the flat, at the dead boiler, at the whole crumbling enterprise, “—is not in the budget.”

Tom stared at her for a long moment. She could see him recalculating, reassessing everything he thought he knew about her financial situation. She hated it. She hated being seen. But there was something else in his expression too—something that almost looked like recognition.

“I have a loan,” he said finally. “From a friend. Miles.”

“Miles as in the Miles who keeps calling you during our meetings?”

Tom winced. “Yeah. That Miles.” He sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa, rubbing his face. “When I left my last job, I needed capital. Just to get started. Miles loaned me five thousand pounds. No contract, no interest. Just a handshake and a promise that I’d pay him back within the year.”

“And how long has it been?”

Tom didn’t answer.

“Tom.”

“Fifteen months,” he said. “Give or take. I’ve been avoiding his calls because I don’t have the money to pay him back, and I don’t have the guts to tell him I’m not even close.” His laugh was bitter. “So much for the startup dream, right? I promised him I’d be profitable by now. I promised him I was the surest bet he’d ever make.”

Jazz wanted to be angry. She wanted to shout at him for hiding this—for letting her think they were in this together when he was carrying his own secret debt. But the anger curdled quickly into something else. She knew what it was to make promises you couldn’t keep. She knew what it felt like to owe someone and watch the debt grow.

“Call him,” she said.

“Jazz, I can’t—“

“Call him, Tom. Explain. Ask if we can borrow a little more. Tell him it’s an emergency, because it is.” She held his gaze. “The worst he can do is say no.”

Tom looked at her for a long moment, then down at his phone. His thumb hovered over Miles’s contact. “He’s going to be furious.”

“Probably. But if he’s truly a friend, he’ll listen. And if he’s not, better to find out now than later.”

Tom nodded slowly and stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Jazz could hear the low murmur of his voice through the thin walls—the stammered apologies, the pauses where Miles was clearly talking over him. She busied herself with the kettle, even though the water was cold and the hob wouldn’t light without power.

A few minutes later, Tom came back. His face was pale, but his shoulders were looser than before.

“He’s transferring eight hundred,” he said. “He’s also calling me an idiot, a coward, and—” Tom glanced at his phone, “—‘a man with the financial instincts of a drunk squirrel.’ But he’s transferring it.”

“See? Friends come through.”

“Yeah.” Tom’s smile was thin, not quite reaching his eyes. “He says he wants it all back by March. Including the original five.”

“March is doable. If we hit our targets, we’ll—“

“It’s not the timeline that worries me.” Tom shoved his phone in his pocket. “It’s what he’ll think if we don’t. Miles is the only person from my old life who still believes in me. The only one who didn’t laugh when I said I was starting a company. And I just called him with my tail between my legs, asking for more money I can’t pay back.”

Jazz wanted to say something reassuring. She wanted to tell him that Miles’s belief was well-placed, that they would hit their numbers, that this would work. But the words tangled in her throat because she wasn’t sure they were true.

So instead, she said: “Let’s fix the boiler.”

---

Dave came back two hours later with a new heat exchanger and a box of parts. He worked through the afternoon while Jazz and Tom sat at the kitchen table, laptops open, trying to focus on the onboarding flow for Davis’s listing. But Jazz’s mind kept drifting to the loan. To the way Tom had said *the only one who still believes in me.*

Not *the only one from my old life.* Just *the only one.*

She kept that observation to herself.

By six p.m., the radiators were ticking back to life, filling the flat with a warmth that felt almost miraculous. Dave left with a final invoice that Tom paid without looking at the total. The moment the door closed, Tom slid down the wall and sat on the floor, head in his hands.

“We have three hundred pounds left,” he said. “For everything. Food, transport, software tools, and whatever else breaks between now and the deadline.”

Jazz sat down on the floor next to him. Their shoulders didn’t quite touch, but they were close. She could smell the cold still clinging to his jacket, undercut by the faint scent of his laundry detergent.

“Then we don’t let anything else break,” she said.

Tom laughed, but it was hollow. “That’s not how life works, Jazz.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. But it’s how we work.” She nudged his shoulder with hers. “We got this far. We’ve got one host, a broken thermostat that’s now fixed, and a big, stupid idea that’s going to work if we can just hold it together for twenty-six more days.”

He looked at her then, and something in his expression shifted—a crack in the armor she hadn’t even realized he was wearing. “You really believe that?”

*No,* she thought. *I’m terrified.* But that wasn’t what he needed to hear. And anyway, it wasn’t entirely true. Somewhere under the fear, there was a stubborn sliver of conviction. Maybe it was this flat. Maybe it was the warmth returning to the pipes. Maybe it was watching him swallow his pride and make that call when every instinct screamed at him not to.

“I believe we don’t have a choice,” she said. “And that’s almost the same thing.”

Tom smiled. It was tired and small, but it was real.

“One of the investors at my last job used to say that necessity is the mother of ugly compromises,” he said. “What do you think? Is this an ugly compromise?”

Jazz looked around the cramped flat—at the mismatched furniture, the stained carpet, the radiator that still pinged as it warmed. At the two of them sitting on the floor like refugees in their own startup.

“This is the ugliest compromise I’ve ever made,” she said. “And also the best one.” She climbed to her feet, holding out a hand to him. “Now get up. We’ve got a host to onboard and a demo to fix before the weekend.”

Tom took her hand and let her pull him up. His palm was warm against hers, and she let go a beat too quickly.

---

Later that night, after Tom had gone to his room, Jazz stood under the hot shower for longer than she should have, letting the heat wash over her skin. The water pressure was weak, and the tile was cracked, and the bathroom smelled faintly of mildew. But it was warm. It was hers.

She dried off and wrapped herself in a towel, then opened her phone. A notification blinked at her: her bank account balance, refreshed for the month. She’d told Tom she had three hundred to spare. The truth was closer to two hundred, and after she sent her half of the boiler money to his account, she’d have just enough for rent on her old flat and a little left for food.

*Do not fall for him again,* she wrote in her notes, not out loud. *He owes money. He hides things. He is a mess.*

She read the words twice, then added: *And so are you.*

She hit save and turned off the light.